Now that the family is gone, and I'm taking a pause in my Maui adventuring, things have settled down at home quite a bit.
Bryan and I are catching up on our Netflix queue. The Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen 50/50 is still sitting in my stack of mail, but we have whipped through two discs of BBC's documentary Planet Earth.
So far, nothing has been more satisfying than lying back in bed and watching our crazy planet and all the crazy animals in it.
I am especially fond of this clip documenting Birds of Paradise going about their business:
Amazing.
Another one of our favorite segments is this clip of baboons wading through a river created from a flash flood that has cut through a desert.
And then of course, the Emperor Penguins weathering winter in Antarctica:
We've also been doing a lot of reading. I'm plowing through a stack of library books: all of them by Bill Bryson. After reading A Walk in the Woods, I'm determined to read most everything Bryson has written. I'm almost finished with In a Sunburned Country, a nonfiction account of Bryson's travels in Australia. My friend Ann had done a semester abroad there, and I remember her telling me about how most of the animals are designed to kill you in terrible ways. I am delighted and horrified by the further details that Bryson parcels out.
It led Bryan and I to do some more youtube searches to learn more about the Giant Worms of Gippsland (they are so large that you can actually hear them gurgling under the ground) and the cassowary: "the flightless, man-size bird that lives in the rain forests, with a razor claw on each foot with which it can slice you open in a deft and appallingly expansive manner..."
After watching the incredibly terrifying and territorial cassowary chase around zoo wardens, we began to watch videos of kangaroos kicking unsuspecting tourists into rivers and whatnot.
We watched this video several times in a row.
Nothing beats a quiet night in.
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